Eccles' practice sits within contemporary phenomenological approaches to painting, investigating embodied perception, colour and the relationship between body, artwork and environment.

My work begins with perception with what we sense before we name, explain or interpret what is in front of us.

For more than thirty years, I have explored this through painting, colour, movement and the body. I work abstractly, allowing colour to establish its own relationships and form to emerge through the process of painting. I am interested in colour not as decoration, but as an experience: something that can alter our sense of space, movement, atmosphere and ourselves.

My practice has been shaped by Goethean colour theory, somatic and movement practices, theatre and Butoh. Through bringing these disciplines into my own artistic practice, I developed Body Sense Perception and Response— an ongoing methodology for exploring the intelligence of sensory experience and the body's capacity to perceive before the mind reaches a conclusion.

This enquiry extends beyond the studio. I am interested in what changes when we become more attentive to how we encounter an artwork, another person, a landscape, or the world around us.

My paintings do not ask to be decoded. They invite an encounter.

To look. To sense. To notice what moves.

And perhaps, for a moment, to experience before deciding what something means.

  • Deanne's path to her current practice, which she is currently calling her, phenomenological artistic methodology, has developed across more than three decades of painting, theatre and movement.

    Her early work was figurative and often politically charged, exploring feminism, the female body and questions of power and place. Over time, however, the figure began to fragment. Representation increasingly felt unable to hold what she was trying to explore.

    A significant shift came through her encounter with Goethe's and Rudolf Steiner's approaches to colour, followed by colour training at the Goetheanum in Switzerland. Colour began to be understood not simply as something applied to form, but as something active — capable of generating movement, relationship and form itself.

    At the same time, years of experimental theatre, Butoh and Body Weather were developing another kind of knowledge: an awareness of gesture, spatial relationship and the body's capacity to perceive and respond to its environment.

    These disciplines gradually ceased to be separate practices. Painting became the place where they converged.

    This convergence became the foundation for Body Sense Perception and Response and continues to shape Deanne's work today.

  • Deanne's current practice is extending Body Sense beyond the studio and into a deeper enquiry into place, memory and the ways we perceive the environments we inhabit.

    During her 2026 residency at Château d'Orquevaux in France, she began working directly with the surrounding landscape — walking, observing, listening and allowing bodily response to become part of the process of making. Encounters with forests, waterways and the historical traces of the region were placed in dialogue with research into the pre-Roman cultures, language and mythology of Gaul.

    Rather than attempting to reconstruct the past, Deanne became interested in the threshold between what can be known historically and what can be sensed, imagined or remembered through an encounter with place.

    This has opened a new direction within her painting. Colour and gesture remain central, but the work is increasingly concerned with landscape as something we participate in rather than simply observe — a living relationship between body, place, memory and time.

    Her current paintings continue this enquiry, asking how attention might allow us to encounter both art and the natural world before imposing meaning upon them.

““Art is more than an image upon a wall. It can have profound psychological and emotional affects, which we may not even be aware of.” Through the techniques I have created, with 'Body Sense Perception', my intention is to bring these affects to consciousness and allow the onlooker to have more of a relationship and sense of deep connectedness with Abstract Art.

.”

— Deanne Eccles

Past Projects

2025

Contemporary Art Station

I’m feeling pretty chuffed to be one of the 70 artists exhibiting in Madrid with Contemporary Art Station.
This is in conjunction with ARCOmadrid. Spain’s International Contemporary Art Fair.
The Madrid Station Exhibition is part of a series of international exhibitions that have already taken place in iconic cities such as Tokyo, Paris, London, Barcelona, ​​Shanghai and Hong Kong.
I love Contemporary Art Station’s mission , of democratising access to art by locating it in unconventional urban spaces.

Contemporary Art Station, the organization is dedicated to promoting contemporary art in places of great affluence, seeking to establish a link between international artists and new audiences.
@contemporaryartstation@artistdeanneeccles
@ARCOmadrid
#contemporaryart#melbourneartist#abstractartist#colourfieldexpressionism

Westend Artspace

2024 solo exhibition